I was a Bruno fan back when he first appeared in GP2. I owned a forum and web page all about Bruno. I met loads of Bruno fans and had a lot of fun. 2 years ago I closed the site down. Why? Not because I really disliked Bruno but because his fandom got to me. It was one of the moments when I realized that I wasn't really cut out to be in a fandom. Not that far in anyway.
I'm not a fan that blindly supports a driver. I'll give credit to anyone where due and I'll also criticize when needed whether I like a driver or not. But with some fans you couldn't say anything at all that wasn't positive without having them act like you just kicked them personally in the face.
"Bruno was 12th which was disappointing seeing he span off after leading the race for 50 laps" is a big no-no (not that it happened) even if Bruno said it was his fault (what a wonderful guy!) it was the fault of someone else. Usually the "disliked" driver of the day.
Their mindset was ugly and a little bit scary at times.
If Bruno gave a team £20mil to race a F1 car it would be fine. If someone else did the same, OMG why are they in F1? How dare they?!
I had to get out of it when they started moaning and demanding that other drivers lose their seat after some rather disappointing results from Bruno made him look likely to lose his Renault seat. Well... Lotus seat. And he did lose it. And they got in Kimi Raikkonen and he was brilliant!
The thing is as much as I love Bruno, he's a good driver, brilliant for any team, works hard and is just so lovely and warm to fans, he just isn't really THAT good. We all like to think our drivers are greater then they probably are but to be honest he just didn't do enough.
I have a whole different complaint about the whole stupid Pay Driver argument.
Now Bruno has left F1, mainly because by the sound of it he didn't want to be mid-field or lower grid. His fans seem to agree with this in the smug satisfaction that given a brilliant car he would have been champion and its F1's loss.
Well no.
Pastor Maldonado has a lot wrong with him, but he is a good fast driver. He won a race.
Bruno could have won a race, he had the same car and was a more consistent and steady driver. But he never looked likely to win a race. Yeah he could have been the next Felipe Massa or Rubens Barrichello but he was not his uncle. He wasn't even Nelson Piquet!
What did Bruno Senna really do to deserve a seat like his fans seem to want him to have? He got so many chances but he just wasn't THAT impressive. I'm surprised he got half the seats he did get. When he got the Hispania/HRT drive I really wanted him to shine, people used the fact that HRT sucked as a reason why he didn't but I don't think that is anywhere near true. I mean I think Lucas di Grassi shone a little in the Virgin and he never got another attempt at F1.
I hate people going on about how he gets places because of his surname but recently it really did seem he did get to places because of it. Pastor just needs to calm the heck down and he'll be a good assit for Williams, Bruno would have left the team stagnant.
I'm happy he's gone. That sounds really mean but I mean it. Before F1 Bruno was a star of the future for me, but it seems since getting into F1 he's became over hyped and his fans REALLY are in love with themselves.
I wish he had done what I believe he could have done, but I don't think he can blame his team or cars.
Ohh I so agree with this!
ReplyDeleteWell bits of this, especially the bits about fans.
I wasn't really a "online" person till I found your website on Bruno, I loved it and the blog comments all made you sound really lovely! So I joined your forum and saw a side to them I never knew exsisted!
As your blogs were usually Bruno news or else they were just really interesting discussion blogs (like this!) they never had a reason to complain about silly things.
On the forum it was just a whole load of tosh the whole time. "Oh x driver shouldn't get a seat even if he's won 20 junior championships, purely on the basis that Bruno has nicer hair then him" or else it was the constant stalking of his girlfriends and moaning about how she wasn't pretty enough or smart enough or smiled enough. Of course the worst was "he scares me so I never want to see him in F1" or "I hate his accent" in fact one member seemed to hate/dislike every American driver/rider that she ever saw/heard!
I'm so happy we got away from them the only thing that was upsetting was that we lost a really good forum and webpage!
It is the last sentence I agree with the most! Though maybe more so because I put 2/3 years hard effort into the forum and web page.
DeleteI did try to be different with the web page, writing blogs that people could enjoy. On the off season I did the themed weekly news blogs that had people laughing. It was difficult coming up with the ideas and writing them but it was good fun! Then I had really random blogs that people just loved to read.
I loved everything I did on the forum and there were only a few moments that really upset me, the last few months were the biggest upset. Losing a lot of friends really did upset me too but by the end I just couldn't stand some of what they were saying. A clean break was what I needed.
Unfortunately there were people it affected long before it affected me and that slowly killed the forum in itself. It became more about a little "in" group, funnily enough as the person that made the forum and web page I ended up out of that group and didn't really want back in.
It also upset me how certain members wanted me to sort out what they saw as problems, though always had to emotionally blackmail me when I had to sort out problems they were making. The whole "I have to take a few days away from here because of this, its upset me so much" when you've purely told them to stop being mean to other posters. I became stuck in the middle of two sets of friends, and unfortunately the friends I'd known for longer where the more rationale ones, but as the other group knew I'd known them for longer and they were actually my FRIENDS they felt marginalized and that I was picking on them. What they didn't know was that I had taken their side a lot of the time.
No one ever really stopped to think about what it was doing to me though. If I had banned certain members no one would post on the forum, which became apparent when we moved to the other forum, mostly because we all talked via text/e-mail or by other means. So I had to keep the members causing the problems which chased the others away meaning I personally was left with the ones that were doing my head in. The moment it felt like I was working I knew I couldn't be there anymore. This was my hobby! I did it because I loved it, but when they got into my head and when they went off on one to the point I couldn't look at certain threads because I knew what was coming and it made me sick I knew I had to give in. I couldn't even write because I was writing for people I didn't like very much.
It is really sad.